Cloud computing and cloud storage networking are becoming the way IT and storage is delivered. With cloud scale storage systems, customers can now take the advantage of virtually infinite cloud resources, on demand, without spending an upfront investment. Vendors such as Amazon, Nirvanix, Rackspace offers storage resources to customers delivered on internet. Customers can now buy a minimal storage resource in their own data center and can avail cloud storage as they further require.
Cloud storage is very attractive for those customers who are on a low budget or those who cannot predict their storage demands or those who want to store their mission critical data in well protected. Cloud storage also offer various cost advantages in terms of operational expenses, as customers don't need to spend on managing, administering storage systems.
Other compelling advantages include backup, archives, storing reference and secondary data. Many File servers, Database Systems store enormous amount of data that is not needed on their day to day business, but need to access these data on compliance/regulatory/legal discovery needs.
So cloud storage is very beneficial to enterprises/individuals in many ways, but customers have many new issues now. When customers use many cloud storage providers, there is no mechanism to have a unified view of all storage that lives in all storage silos, and there is no benefits of virtualization that span across all such silos.
When customers access the cloud storage hosted thousands of miles away, unexpected WAN latencies will bring down the application response times. If the WAN connection is severed, the customers cannot access the cloud storage. If the cloud provider goes down, still data becomes unavailable. Because of these multiple issues, customer finds it difficult to adopt cloud storage in to their data center planning. When a cloud service provider goes out of business, there is no way to insulate that disruption to users who have stored data in the providers cloud. Many cloud providers impose a limit on the size of the file stored which is a problem for many users who deal in large files. Many cloud users may not have any facility to buy or manage a cloud brokering system in their premise. Customers will end up storing the same data more than once, from different locations, as there is no de-duplication software developed to be consumed from a cloud API.
Therefore, there is a strong need to provide for an architecture and method to overcome the above-mentioned problems.